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Wednesday, 28 March 2012

Discussions about language uses rank among the
most fiendish I’ve witnessed, short of physical aggression. Try?
Just ask anyone, anywhere, any day, what they think about anything
that’s been nagging at you lately in your or someone else’s (or
their!) use of a word or a phrase, or whatever, in any of your
languages.

Do
pad yourself emotionally against the outcome, because attitudes
towards language uses are attitudes towards language users. However
we may have persuaded ourselves otherwise, languages and their uses
do not exist without people. The whole process in fact follows a neat
circular path. We start off with more or less (un)friendly comments
about how people sound and look when they use their languages,
including those languages that we don’t understand, such as
throaty, lippy, twangy, lilty, teethy, or beautiful and ugly.
We then associate these people-features with the languages that
people speak, and we complete the process by concluding that whoever
speaks, say, an aggressive language must be an aggressive
person/people too. The supposedly descriptive
labels that we go on using don’t need to make sense, by the way –
including labels found in clinical settings, as this (now archived) post at Clinical
Linguistics, What on earth does ‘Guttural’ mean, anyway?
exemplifies.

Why
the label-mania, I wonder, and the mostly hard feelings that go with
it? My suspicion is that it all stems from two things. First, the top
regard in which we tend to hold ourselves. Not all of us got official
entitlement to pontificate about linguistic goodness and badness, of
course, but the trouble is that so many of us feel
entitled.

One
book that I read some time ago, Beneath the Dust of Time, gave me a historical clue to why this is so. Jacques
R. Pauwels reports, among other things, the hubris pervading the
names that we give to our tribes, including the big tribes we came to
know as “countries”. Pauwels quotes Mircea Eliade’s essays on
ancients myths and religions, where it is noted that “archaic
peoples believed virtually without exception that they themselves
inhabited the center of the
world”,
and adds that “alternative names for the rather trite ‘center of
the world’ were ‘navel of the earth’ and ‘place where gods
descended on earth’.” In addition to assorted peoples’ names
informing us that they have been chosen by assorted deities, we find
that the Franks are the ‘brave people’, that the name of the
Etruscans means ‘human beings’, and that the Huns are, simply,
‘the people’. Some of these labels concern the peoples’
languages: the root of Slav
means ‘those who can speak a language’ (their
language, that is), and Arab
refers to ‘those who speak an understandable language’, whereby
everyone else probably is, as the Ancient Greeks put it, a ‘barbarian’.

We may well wonder who’s whose
barbarian. In 1580, Montaigne explained, in
his Essais, that
“chacun appelle barbarie ce qui
n’est pas de son usage”, tellingly in an essay titled ‘Des
Cannibales’. G. Bernard Shaw later rephrased
Montaigne’s line, in his Caesar and Cleopatra, to have
Caesar seek forgiveness on behalf of those who commit Britannus-like
faux pas: “he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his
tribe and island are the laws of nature”. Small wonder that, in our
cyber-age, even supposedly aseptic IT tools, like internet-based
concordancers, go on reflecting human prejudice: try the recently
launched bab.la Wordingfor results of input like “Y are”
or “Z are”, where Y and Z stand for nationality/language names
and profession names, respectively (tack för
tipset, Daniel!).

The second reason behind our readiness
to opinionate about language uses draws on the (mis)understanding
that there is a single “lawful” way of using a language,
whether you’re monolingual or multilingual. (Monolingual) teenagers
and (multilingual) language learners stand out as the usual suspects.
What happens in practice is that your uses pass muster if they match
either the uses of your interlocutors, or uses that they can
recognise, and so relate to. It’s not so much that we all have our
own (private) standards, it’s mostly that we take it for granted
that if you and I are using the “same” language, we’re both
supposed to make ourselves intelligible in it. I’ve talked about
intelligibility before
and I will come back to it some other day
but, next time, I’ll have a couple more thoughts to offer on
the tribulations of those barbarians who insist on being
multilingual in a world designed for monolinguals.

Meanwhile, though, I have a goodie for
you: see whether you can guess which language deserved this encomium
from one of its native speakers:

“The XXX
language is, decidedly, imperial in its virility, in its tuneful
orchestration, in its fabulously inexhaustible contents, in its
gently enticing appeals, in its riveting and beguiling seduction.”

Saturday, 17 March 2012

Seneca is credited with
stating that “Where the speech is corrupted, the mind is also”.
He chose to speak his mind
from the perspective of corrupted rather than pristine speech,
following the time-tested strategy of steering attention away from
what we
might be doing, right or wrong, by calling attention to what others
are doing wrong. Such choices are generally meant to entail that we
are doing things right, and that we therefore have the right to
proffer comments about what is right and what is wrong, because we
know the difference.

“You are what
you speak” matches popular You-are-what-you-X
generalisations about people’s identities – including those of
people we’ve never met in our lives.
Speech-wise, the causality that is
inherent in these assertions may not always be straightforward (you
are so because you speak so, as the title of this post suggests, or
you speak so because you are so?) but our linguistic signals go on
eliciting rulings about us. This is one argument I develop in an article
dealing with clinical assessment of multilingual children,
but which applies to language uses across the board. The point I make
there is that “Whether linguistic and cultural behaviours are
intentional or not, they project images of the user as belonging (or
not belonging, or wishing to belong) to a particular social group,
which in turn prompts personal judgements about the user and
associated linguistic responses from the interlocutor, including a
clinical interlocutor.”

Equally popular
is the idea that it makes sense to speak of degenerate vs. unsullied
uses of language, which draws on the assumption that languages can
suffer injury. On this assumption, languages are identifiable objects
(containers?)
with a life and possessions (contents?) of their own. Our job as
users is to pick and choose from within these carefully preserved
preciosities the dainty morsels which will hopefully do justice to
the dainty intellects we wish to project as we express ourselves
linguistically. Seneca dixit.

This
ain’t easy. Being ordered around by languages, I mean. Some
of us go through our entire lives cringing at our own ways of using
our own language(s), native languages included, because we apparently
do things that “the languages” do not allow us to do. Assigning
decision power of this kind to “the languages” is of course a
good way of skirting the issue that whatever evaluative benchmarks
we’re using are man-made.

So,
who are you, and who’s telling on you? For users of foreign
languages, the benchmark is commonly taken to be a “native”
standard, but it turns out that even claiming nativeness won’t do:
natives also get judged by their primi inter (not so) pares, other
natives. If you read Danish, have a look at the Lexiophiles post
Lyder din dialekt begavet eller bare underholdende?
(If you don’t, no problem, the page has a link to an English
version, ‘Does your dialect sound bright or just funny?’). Or
check out G. Bernard Shaw’s Preface to his Pygmalion, where he says that “It is
impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some
other Englishman hate or despise him.” In Act 1, in turn, Henry
Higgins claims that he can place a man’s accent “within two
streets” of London. Big Brother
may be watching you, in other words, even on the street where you
live.

The fear of the judgemental ear/eye, or shyness before it, may well be the reason why
some of us avoid using our foreign languages. We know we don’t do it like thembecause we’ve been told so, time and again. Some of us don’t
mind speaking foreign, though – or have no other choice, because we
do have something to say and those to whom we want to say it don’t
speak our languages. One example of this prompted an inspiring
comment from Rebecca Helm-Ropelato, about an
interview in English given by Italian show-biz man Roberto Benigni a
few years ago: Speaking in a second language. Rebecca
warned me that the video links at this post no longer work,
unfortunately, but she sent me a link to another interview of Benigni speaking in English
(grazie!!) – where, besides, both interviewer and interviewee start
off giving evidence that we can *both* talk about different ways of
using a language *and* have loads of fun about it, without injuring
either “the languages” or anyone’s feelings.

This is easy.
Using civilised tones to talk about our differences, I mean. Not
mistaking difference for inability, I also mean. Canadian
anthropologist Wade Davis
once said that “Other
cultures are not failed attempts at being you”. Neither are other
ways of using languages – or other languages, for that matter.
Everyday things and everyday
behaviour are not everyday to everyone. Next time, I’ll try to
explain why so many of us think that they are.

Wednesday, 7 March 2012

Healthy individuals may lose hold of
their languages, a process that is sometimes called language loss, or
language attrition – which is not the same, by the way, as
so-called language death.

We may lose our languages for a number
of reasons, including perceived lack of prestige
of a particular language, or lack of (willing) users of it around us,
all of them having the lack bit in common: lack of use. I mean
“use” in the sense of meaningful use. Talking about a
single vs. several brown cows in order to introduce the grammatical
concepts of singular vs. plural, for example, or about the same
ruminants jumping over the moon in order to introduce prepositions is
not meaningful, so the languages that we learn in school as “language subjects”
don’t count for what I want to say here. Languages learned in this
way cannot be lost, because they were never acquired: they are lost
from the beginning.

I’ve talked before
about how children may lose their languages because of less than
ideal input conditions. Let me add here a couple of additional
factors. One of them is that multilingual families may live in places where none of the parents’ languages are used, like my
family did as the children were growing up. In our case, mum and dad
were the only input providers. In our sporadic visits to our
respective home countries, our children used to gape in incredulity
at their realisation that Swedish and Portuguese could after all be
spoken by “everybody” around them, as they put it.

One other factor is that parents use,
well, parental-kind of language, and therefore dated language – which is
true of any cross-generational uses of language, whether each
generation uses one language or more than one. In my family, we
parents had as little contact with child users of Portuguese and
Swedish as our children did, so none of us had any idea about what
the trendy youth-speak of the day was. Our children, whose
peer-nurturing in their home languages was proceeding exclusively
through home-made cross-pollination,
learned about it the hard way, through scoffs and guffaws from
visiting and visited peers at the “aaancient!!!” metaphors,
idioms and turns of phrase that they had inherited from us. Chapter
9, ‘A new language: intruder or guest?’ in my book Three is a Crowd?
reports in detail about this. If you read Swedish, have a look also at
Lena Normén-Younger’s post on a related topic, Vad gör Du när någon skrattar åt dina barns svenska?
(‘What do you do when someone laughs at your children’s
Swedish?’).

Children, however, may have the good
excuse that they are still learning their languages and that, in
time, they’ll get over whatever linguistic glitches they’re
stumbling over. What to say, then, of fully grown-up individuals who give similar signs of dwindling language skills? It happened to me, for one.
Given the away-from-home-country kind of globe-trotting which
characterises my family, both of us parents were naturally unaware of
trendy adult-speak in our respective languages too. What we heard and
read, back in Sweden and Portugal, on radio, TV, newspapers and all
around us, at times struck us more like foreign-speak than
native-speak. My case was compounded by being a stay-at-home mum while the children were being born, which meant that my Portuguese ended up fluent
in baby-speak only, for a significant number of years. I
literally lost the ability to construct complex things like full
sentences, for example, or to avoid using jingly language peppered
with diminutives and/or augmentatives.

I was, in short, using my supposedly
“native language”like an imbecile, and I didn’t know I was. I do know one thing
now: I wouldn’t have wanted to
have my Portuguese language skills clinically assessed at that time,
as little as I would have thought it fair to have my children’s
linguistic proficiency assessed through a single language,
either Swedish or Portuguese, as they were growing up. All four of us
were using our languages inappropriately for our ages.

We got over it, all of us, to regain
our languages whenever we got the chance to use them beyond the restricted contexts to which they had been limited. To
me, observations such as these are evidence of two things. First,
that the process of learning to use your languages goes on
throughout life. Languages remain alive if the uses that they serve
remain so too. And second, that your languages
will be more or less well-oiled at different times in your life.
Languages come and go as and when we need them to do so.

Nevertheless,
like my children, I was also judged (and laughed at...) by my
peers on account of my linguistic inadequacy. The way we express ourselves through our languages seems indeed to count as a reliable
gauge of what we are. I’ll leave
this matter for my next post.

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About Me

I’m a freelance
linguist with a keen interest in multilingualism. I was born in
Portugal, acquired French in Africa at age 3, married a Swede a
little later, raised three trilingual children (mostly) in Singapore,
and I work (mostly) in English. Homepage: Being Multilingual

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